Chrome marketshare hits 20.4 percent

Marketshare statistics from Net Applications reveal Google's Chrome browser surpassed the 20 percent mark in July for the first time as the browser captured 20.4 percent of the market. The biggest loser was Firefox, which stumbled to 15.1 percent, the browser's lowest marketshare since October 2007. Internet Explorer remains the most popular browser with a marketshare of 58 percent, down slightly from the month before.

Chrome's July user share of 20.4% put the browser solidly in second place, but still far behind IE in Net Applications' tallies. IE's share last month was 58%, down slightly from the month before.

Firefox also lost user share in July, dropping half a percentage point to 15.1%. It was the ninth straight month that the desktop browser lost share. In the past three months alone, Firefox has fallen nearly two points.

The timing of the decline has been terrible, as Mozilla's current contract with Google ends in November. That deal, which assigned Google's search engine as the default for most Firefox customers, has generated the bulk of Mozilla's revenue. In 2012, for example, the last year for which financial data was available, Google paid Mozilla an estimated $272 million, or 88% of all Mozilla income.